The brief for the Ledger table was simple, which made it harder. The client wanted a dining table in solid wood, 240 centimetres long, that could seat ten and that would still be in the family in fifty years. No surface treatment beyond oil. No metal. A table that looked as though it knew exactly what it was.

The first drawings were too refined. Clean tapered legs, a subtle reveal at the apron, the kind of detailing that reads well on screen and feels slightly precious in person. We kept simplifying. By the fourth iteration we had removed the apron entirely and were working with a solid plank top sitting directly on four square-section legs. It looked almost too plain. We printed it at scale, taped the sheets to the wall, and lived with it for two days.

The proportions were right but the leg section was wrong — too light for the mass of the top, which was to be laminated from three boards of solid ash, each one 50 millimetres thick. We increased the leg section to 80 by 80 millimetres and the table immediately stopped looking provisional. The same drawing, one change.

The question of joinery

We spent longer on the joint between the leg and the top than on almost anything else. A mortise and tenon was the obvious solution, and obvious for good reason — it has been the standard for several centuries. But the top is wide enough that seasonal movement across the grain could stress a rigid joint over time. We asked Carpintaria Valente in Braga to propose something, and their answer was a wooden button system: small hardwood tabs in a routed channel that allow the top to move while holding it firmly to the leg structure. The solution is invisible from above and completely honest from below.

The wood arrived from a supplier in the north who sources boards from managed forests in central Portugal. We visited before ordering and spent an afternoon in the yard with the workshop foreman going through the stacks, choosing boards for colour and grain consistency. The three boards that make up the top came from adjacent planks in the same log, which is why the grain runs through the full width of the table as though it were one piece.

The first table went to a house in Porto. We visited six months after delivery and found the surface already marked — a ring from a glass, a slight scuff near one end. The clients had not tried to remove them. The oil finish means the surface can be maintained with nothing more than a cloth and more oil, and the marks that accumulate become part of the table’s surface over time. That was always the intention. A table that shows no evidence of use is a table that has not been used properly.